Bruce Meyers, who used his skills as a boat builder to invent the first fiberglass dune buggy, unleashing the late 1960s craze for off-road rides and thriving until imitators flooded the market, died on February 19. at his home in Valley Center, California. He was 94 years old.
The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood cancer, said his wife, Winnifred (Baxter) Meyers.
Meyers’ invention had a major promotional boost after he and a friend took the Meyers Manx (name of the cat with a tail stump) to a record time along almost 1,600 kilometers of the rough roads of the Baja California Peninsula in 1967 The victory proved the viability of the vehicle and made an old beach boy the darling of the off-road devotees.
“Go back to the lifestyle I lived when I got into this,” he said in a 2017 interview with Motorward, an automotive website. “It wasn’t about higher education or education, but just fun.”
Meyers was a surfer in Southern California with a background in fine arts who in the late 1950s and early 1960s watched four-wheel drive Jeeps fight for traction on the sand dunes.
But he saw better expressions of the freedom to drive off-road in the modified Volkswagen Beetles, which were more efficient at navigating the dunes because the weight of the engine was at the rear. At the time, enthusiasts were renovating the Beetles, cutting the body to make them even lighter and adding wide tires.
Something about those vehicles reminded Mr. Meyers of his childhood.
“All of these characters – Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse – drove small carts with big, fat tires,” he told The National, an Abu Dhabi newspaper, in 2012. “Maybe my instincts when I was creating the dune buggy were driven for My memories. “
For 18 months, he worked in his small garage in Newport Beach to create the Meyers Manx. He removed the body from a beetle, shortened the floor section, and then bolted a solid fiberglass housing (with fenders, sides and front hood area) that was moldable and light, but sturdy.
He completed the Beetle that became Manx in 1964, making it light and fast, with a shorter turning radius and greater traction than the dune buggies that preceded it. He called his creation Old Red for his painting.
He started selling kits that would allow others to convert his beetles. But sales did not increase until 1967, when he and a friend, Ted Mangels, an engineer, took the Meyers Manx from La Paz, Mexico, north to Tijuana in just 34 hours and 45 minutes – breaking the previous record, which had been detained by two motorcyclists for about five hours.
A cover story by Road & Track, which chronicled Baja’s wild adventure, started ordering the kits. But the demand ended up surpassing Meyers’ ability to produce the kits – he insisted he was not an entrepreneur – and rivals made copies of his project.
Mr. Meyers has produced more than 5,000 kits, but it is estimated that at least 20 times more fake Meyers Manx have been produced. He lost a legal fight against a copycat manufacturer to keep his patent on a “sand vehicle”. In 1971, he closed BF Meyers & Company.
“It took 10 years for me to hear the words ‘buggy’ and not be furious,” he told Car and Driver in 2006.
And almost three decades before returning to the business.
Bruce Franklin Meyers was born in Los Angeles on March 12, 1926. His father, John, helped open car dealerships for Henry Ford. Her mother, Peggy, was a music creator.
Mr. Meyers left the college to join the merchant navy and volunteered for the navy during World War II. He was serving aboard the Bunker Hill aircraft carrier when he was attacked by two Japanese kamikaze aircraft on May 11, 1945, near Okinawa. He remembered to jump into the water when the burning conveyor started to sink; he gave a sailor his life jacket and helped a badly burned pilot until they were rescued by a destroyer hours later.
In the carnage, 346 sailors and airmen died, 264 were injured and 43 disappeared.
“I spent almost a month returning with a reduced crew, removing dead men from the ship,” Meyers told The National.
After the war, he returned to the merchant navy, spending time in Tahiti. He then attended art schools in San Francisco and Los Angeles for six years, specializing in portraits.
He worked for several years at Jensen Marine on fiberglass sailboats – an experience that helped him build his revolutionary buggy.
In the nearly 30 years after his company closed, Mr. Meyers had several jobs, including working for a boat manufacturer.
Then, in the late 1990s, he fully returned to the buggy world. With Winnie Meyers, his sixth wife, he founded the Manx Club and then produced a limited edition of the Meyers Manx kit identical to the original. He also developed several other kits, such as the Manx 2 + 2 and the Manx SR.
The couple sold the company in November to Trousdale Ventures, an investment firm.
“He was 94,” said Winnie Meyers by phone, “and I had to stop.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Meyers leaves a daughter, Julie Meyers; five grandchildren; and a brother, Richard. Another daughter, Georgia Meyers, and a son, Tim, have died in recent years.
In 2014, the Meyers Manx was the second significant car, motorcycle or truck (after the 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe CSX2287) included in the National Historic Vehicle Register, an eight-year project that details the historical and cultural significance of American vehicles. The registration is a collaboration between the Association of Historic Vehicles, a group of owners and the Department of the Interior.
In a tribute to Meyers’ ingenuity and commercial problems, the record said the Meyers Manx was “the inspiration for more than 250,000 similar cars manufactured by other companies and is therefore the most replicated car in history”.